Tag "Rain"

Figure 1 shows a Pacific-centered and an Atlantic-centered view of the average rainfall from the end of 1997 to the start of 2015 as measured by the TRMM satellite.
The ITCZ is where the two great global hemispheres of the atmospheric circulation meet near the Equator.
In the Pacific and Atlantic on average the ITCZ is just above the Equator and in the Indian Ocean, it’s just below the Equator.
It gives us a way to calculate how much this cools the surface.
And in the same way that our bodies are cooled by evaporation, the surface of the planet is also cooled by evaporation.
Now, we note above that on average, the increase is 1.33 millimeters of water per year.
So over the period of this record, we have increased evaporative cooling of 0.10 W/m2 per year, and we have increased radiative warming from GHGs of 0.06 W/m2 per year.
Which means that over that period and that area at least, the calculated increase in warming radiation from GHGs was more than counterbalanced by the observed increase in surface cooling from increased evaporation.
• Rain re-evaporating as it falls to cool the atmosphere • Cold wind entrained by the rain blowing outwards at surface level to cool surrounding areas • Dry descending air between rain cells and thunderstorms allowing increased longwave radiation to space.
Calculation of energy required to evaporate 1.33 liters of water.

oh sheet Changing weather patterns have triggered a stark change in how Greenland is melting, according to a new paper published on Thursday.
By combining data from satellites and weather stations, a team of scientists found that rainstorms are now driving nearly one-third of the frozen island’s rapid melt.
Those runoff events are increasingly tied to rainstorms — even during winter — that trigger extensive new ice melt.
“That was a surprise to see,” lead author Marilena Oltmanns of the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Germany said in a statement.
The researchers looked at more than 300 sudden melt episodes from 1979 to 2012, the most recent year available.
Warmer air temperatures are having a big effect on Greenland, but warm water falling as rain is apparently disastrous to the ice — tunneling through divots and cracks and melting surrounding snow with abandon.
The rain-on-snow process transforms the surface of the ice sheet from fluffy and reflective to compact and dimmer, a dangerous feedback loop that’s perfect for encouraging further melt on sunny days.
“We are starting to realize, you have to look at all the seasons.” It seems increasingly clear that the Greenland ice sheet crossed a tipping point around 2002.
In the decade after that year, melting increased nearly four-fold, coming mostly from the southern part of the island that’s especially prone to these rain-on-ice events.
In recent decades, meltwater tied to rain events has doubled in the summer, and tripled in the winter — despite overall total volume of precipitation on the ice sheet remaining about the same.

Rainy weather is becoming increasingly common over parts of the Greenland ice sheet, triggering sudden melting events that are eating at the ice and priming the surface for more widespread future melting, says a new study.
Some parts of the ice sheet are even receiving rain in winter — a phenomenon that will spread as climate continues to warm, say the researchers.
Greenland has been losing ice in recent decades due to progressive warming.
Rainy weather, say the study authors, is increasingly becoming the trigger for that runoff.
The researchers combined satellite imagery with on-the-ground weather observations from 1979 to 2012 in order to pinpoint what was triggering melting in specific places.
Combining the two sets of data, the researchers zeroed in on more than 300 events in which they found the initial trigger for melting was weather that brought rain.
Total precipitation over the ice sheet did not change; what did change was the form of precipitation.
Melting can be driven by a complex of factors, but the introduction of liquid water is one of the most powerful, said Marco Tedesco, a glaciologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and coauthor of the study.
Warm air, of course, can melt ice directly, but is not very efficient by itself, he said.
While rain is hitting increasingly far-flung parts of the ice in summer, winter rainfall so far appears mostly confined to lower elevations in south and southwest Greenland.

Rainy weather is becoming increasingly common over parts of the Greenland ice sheet, triggering sudden melting events that are eating at the ice and priming the surface for more widespread future melting, says a new study.
Some parts of the ice sheet are even receiving rain in winter — a phenomenon that will spread as climate continues to warm, say the researchers.
Greenland has been losing ice in recent decades due to progressive warming.
Rainy weather, say the study authors, is increasingly becoming the trigger for that runoff.
The researchers combined satellite imagery with on-the-ground weather observations from 1979 to 2012 in order to pinpoint what was triggering melting in specific places.
Combining the two sets of data, the researchers zeroed in on more than 300 events in which they found the initial trigger for melting was weather that brought rain.
Total precipitation over the ice sheet did not change; what did change was the form of precipitation.
Melting can be driven by a complex of factors, but the introduction of liquid water is one of the most powerful, said Marco Tedesco, a glaciologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and coauthor of the study.
Warm air, of course, can melt ice directly, but is not very efficient by itself, he said.
While rain is hitting increasingly far-flung parts of the ice in summer, winter rainfall so far appears mostly confined to lower elevations in south and southwest Greenland.

The outlook for the environment in the Murray-Darling Basin, particularly in the north, is extremely challenging and there will be almost no scope for environmental flows for the remainder of the 2018-19 year unless it rains, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority has warned.
It says the focus will be “on providing drought refuges and avoiding irreversible loss of species”.
It says conditions in the Coorong, a Ramsar-listed wetland in South Australia, are deteriorating, as are conditions in the Narran Lakes, despite the federal government paying $80m for water rights aimed at restoring them.
It acknowledges this is due to extraction by irrigators upstream as well as climate.
“The hydrology in this area has changed in recent years … an effect which can be tied to both the volume of water extracted from the river and climate across the northern basin,” it says.
“For flows measured at Weir 32 on the lower Darling [at Menindee] for the period of 1982 through to 2000 there were no cease-to-flow days (flow below 5ML/d).
Australia is the canary, and the coalmine, for the world when it comes to water stress | R Keller Kopf Read more The report found there was a reduced number of waterbird species in the northern basin wetlands and “little to no waterbird breeding”.
The MDBA does not speculate on whether there will be more fish deaths, but warns that environmental flows, if they occur, will need to be managed carefully to avoid exacerbating the situation by pushing polluted or de-oxygenated water downstream.
“It will take many years of good conditions for the [fish] populations in the lower Darling to recover,” the MDBA report says.
The situation in the Murray is a little better but the MDBA says there are challenges mainly in providing water to floodplains in the future.

In the township of Chamanculo, in Maputo, Mozambique, a network of household taps made the community water pump obsolete years ago, freeing residents from the daily burden of lugging massive jerrycans of water long distances.
But a water crisis, partly caused by an ongoing drought affecting much of southern Africa, is already reversing progress in this coastal city.
Unable to afford the private wells, boreholes and extra tanks used by the rich to buffer themselves from the restrictions, Chamanculo’s residents once again find themselves gathering at a single tap.
They fill up 25-litre canisters and carefully balance them on their heads, often making repeat trips home and back again.
Unlike Capetown, in neighbouring South Africa where the water supply is at breaking point, Maputo has not got to the stage where officials have predicted a “day zero”, when taps are forecast to run dry.
Nobody present was in any doubt of the role climate change is playing in the water shortages.
Climate change makes everything considerably more serious.
“The water level is too low for the scale,” Timba said “We need to build a new one.” It is only the second time in a decade that the water level has been so depleted.
Swathes of land across the region, from South Africa to Zambia, have been hit by high temperatures and low rainfall.
Though rainfall in Mozambique has been reasonably good elsewhere, Swaziland in the south-west, whose rivers feed into the Pequenos Libombos dam, has suffered.

Irma and Harvey lay the costs of climate change denial at Trump’s door The president’s dismissal of scientific research is doing nothing to protect the livelihoods of ordinary Americans Bob Ward Sunday 10 September 2017 09.05 AEST As the US comes to terms with its second major weather disaster within a month, an important question is whether the devastation caused by hurricanes Harveyand Irma will convince Donald Trump and his administration of the reality of climate change.
Third, apart from strong winds and heavy rainfall, hurricanes cause damage through storm surges as their winds push seawater ahead of them.
Sea levels have been gradually rising globally, making storm surges bigger and deadlier.
Scientists are still not sure about the other ways in which climate change may be impacting hurricanes.
… Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/10/hurricane-irma-harvey-climate-change-trump The biggest problem for alarmists like Bob is there is no upward trend in hurricane frequency or intensity.
(h/t Benny Peiser) … It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.
What if we keep burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Climate models have never been validated in any meaningful scientific sense – an issue which bothers some climate scientists so much, they argue that the definition of science itself must be changed, to accommodate climate models’ lack of scientific falsifiability.
Are climate models falsifiable?
In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material… Guest essay by Eric Worrall A Californian judge ruled that President Trump’s administration acted illegally in suspending Obama era royalty hikes against resource projects on government land.

NASA and NOAA see massive rainfall and winds in Hurricane Irma – now Cat3.
Irma is moving toward the west near 13 mph (20 km/h).
The estimated minimum central pressure is 964 mb (28.47 inches).
After forming in the eastern Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday tropical storm Irma strengthened and became a powerful category three hurricane on Thursday August 31, 2017.
Finding Irma’s Heaviest Rainfall That heavy rainfall was confirmed by the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite.
GPM’s radar (DPR Ku Band) showed the height and the 3-D rainfall structure of powerful storms spiraling around hurricane Irma.
DPR showed that storm tops were reaching heights of over 9.6 miles (15.5 km) in the band of powerful convective storms north of the hurricane’s center.
Irma’s Location and Strength on Sept. 1 The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on Sept. 1 that Irma was undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle.
The small eye was becoming less distinct, with both microwave and visible imagery indicating the presence of a forming outer eyewall.
Irma is predicted to have winds of over 123 mph (110 knots) within the next five days.

Hurricane Harvey will bring some of the heaviest downpours anyone has ever seen.
But its worst feature is still to come: several days of what could be some of the most intense rainfall this nation has ever recorded, a clear signal of climate change.
After a destructive storm surge washed away homes, and winds as strong as 132 mph blew away roofs and left hundreds of thousands without power, Harvey is expected to stall, drastically worsening the risk of catastrophic inland flooding from relentless rains.
As of Saturday morning, nearly 15 inches had already been recorded as bands of heavy thunderstorms streamed onshore from the warm Gulf of Mexico, with at least five more days of heavy rain on the way.
Some high-resolution models predict even more.
(For reference, the estimated 1-in-100-year seven-day rainfall total for the region is just 18 inches.)
Forecasters racked their brains to recall a scenario so dire anywhere in the world; a 2015 typhoon hitting the Philippines produced a similar amount of rain, but over a much smaller area.
All thunderstorms, including hurricanes, can produce more rain in a warmer atmosphere, which boosts the rate of evaporation and the water-holding capacity of clouds.
Some of the worst flooding in the region’s history has come from slow-moving storms like Harvey.
But flooding is what kills most people in hurricanes, and that will only get worse.

Climate Change-Fueled Storms Could Leave Less Water for Drinking.
Algal blooms aren’t new.
More rain in already-wet agricultural areas will leach away even more nutrients, causing more blooms, leading to more water shortages—impacting fisheries, agriculture, and public health.
A new study published today in Science shows just how bad these algal blooms will be, based on three different carbon emissions scenarios.
Scientists have known about the links between rain, nutrient runoff, and disaster for years.
During that time, she worked with her lab to develop a model linking rainfall to nutrient runoff, which she published last fall.
The other scenarios are incremental versions of humanity cleaning up its act, leading to slightly less nitrogen runoff.
Even the rosiest scenario predicts runoff increases ranging around 5 to 10 percent, depending on the region and how far you project into the future.
In order to counteract all that runoff, the region needs to dump 30 percent less nitrogen into its soil.
Currently, farmers are working towards 20 percent.

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